Service

photo by: Mark Cummings

We are female Altar Boys. Servers. Altar Servers. I am eleven. My sister, Samantha, is nine. “Mass will be less boring.” Our mother encourages enthusiastically. “It’s an admirable opportunity.” Our father corrects, his thick black eyebrows rising.

We are fit for long cotton robes and taught how to strike soft paper matches by bending the paper books backwards.  We become the altar-serving sisters, performing nearly every Sunday at Martha and Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Lakeville, Massachusetts.

After several successful months of service under our brown rope belts, one blunder occurs that causes us all to regret this decision to sanctify my sister, Samantha, and I.

It is a quiet Sunday afternoon at the church where off white ceilings and walls of rough spiral plaster are intercepted by dark wooden beams and tall stain glass windows. Beside the altar, side-by-side, Samantha and I stand. Anticipating the mass’s communion preparatory blessing rituals, Samantha holds the golden chalice of crossed wafers. I hold the wine. When the priest turns toward us with his palms up and nods his red bald head, Sam steps forward and up onto the altar, but her long cream colored robe slides under her shoe and she steps on it and trips. She goes down onto her stomach, causing the soon-to-be Body of Christ to project up and out like compressed confetti from a can.  The hosts fall to the red carpet like snow falling over a massacre. Samantha, rug burned and petrified of scoldings, raises her eyes to the priest. This, of course, has never happened to us before and therefore we do not have the slightest idea of how to mend this mistake. The old man interrupts our frozen fright with curt instructions. “Pick it up!” He whispers. And we do. On our knobbly knees, we gather the hosts like handfuls of sand. Every person in the congregation is watching, even the fussy baby in the back. In the front, our father sits with his eyes behind his hand in a quiet humiliation. Beside him, our mother has her mouth behind her hand, trying not to laugh.